Ten Text Link Advertising Pitfalls
by Paul Flyer
Beginners eager to make some revenue from their website will find text link advertising to be attractive. Here are ten potential pitfalls. Think about these things carefully before jumping into text link advertising.
As an Advertiser
- Buying a link from most publishers is just that: a link. Only when purchased from high volume sites does a text link become a means of visible advertising that people actually click on. In other words, don’t expect much traffic to come directly from that link. You are simply buying the benefit of having someone link to your site. You will receive some traffic, but from most sites, it won’t be bucketloads.
- Don’t overspend. You can very easily spend too much when your website is generating very little. Work into the process slowly.
- Buy a link from a quality site. Learn all you can about the site from whom you want to place the link. Visit the site. Is this the kind of site you want your website associated with?
- Buy your first link from a homepage. Even though you may not see direct traffic from the site, it will begin to give your site some level of name recognition and presence. Plus, homepages tend to provide better weight to the relative “value” of your site.
- Take the time to develop well worded anchor text. This will potentially affect your position in the SERPs for those terms.
Recommendation:
Buy a single low cost link from a decent home page. Hold onto that link for three months. Don’t buy anymore links during that time. This will do four things: 1) if your site is not currently crawled, it will be, 2) give you time to learn more about text link ads, 3) give you time you work on what counts: your website 4) keep you from overspending.
As a publisher
- Advertisers look at website traffic as one criteria for placing a link on your site. This is a hard one for beginners to overcome. While you maybe able to offer an attractive price, most advertisers want the benefit of being SEEN along with the paid link. Low traffic sites don’t provide the ability to be
“seen”. - Advertisers look at link popularity to assess the viability of a website. Taking time to build quality links to your site before you even begin to offer adspace is probably time wisely spent.
- Dont overestimate the value of your website. Start with low cost reasonable pricing.
- Place the ads in visible places on your website. Again, while your advertisers may not see much direct traffic, it boosts their confidence in your site if they know their link is highly visible.
- Remember that text links advertising is just one possible means of revenue. It is not by any means the only means. So be patient when advertisers are none or few. In time, they will come.
Recommendation:
Wait until you can consistently reach 3000-5000 pageviews a month before you try to offer adspace. Build several quality links to your site. Find a text link broker that works for you. While I recommend a particular text link broker for beginners, by all means try them all and find the one that works best for you.
Further reading: Read our recommendation on text link ad brokers
[tags]text+links,text+link+ads[/tags]
Be sure to review our list of recommended web tools.
